Nets 94, Hawks 89: Advanced Box & Reaction

Check out the advanced box score from last night’s 94-89 Nets victory over the Hawks here.

Some brief takeaways:

Reggie Evans’ 20 rebounds in 29 minutes adds up to a 40.6% total rebounding percentage — and that wasn’t even close to his best outing of the year. Much of that damage came on the defensive end, and Evans was a big reason that the Hawks only rebounded 11% of their own misses, less than half of the league average.

Lopez only ended the game with one block, but it was the biggest defensive play of the game — with the Nets up 3 and around 30 seconds left, Jeff Teague caught Deron Williams with a backdoor cut, and Lopez slid over and blocked Teague’s layup attempt. Two really key points on this play: Firstly, the first option was to get Kyle Korver an open three-pointer off a curl screen, but Bogans played over the screen perfectly and cut off any potential lane for Korver to get to the basket. Secondly, Lopez not only blocked the shot, but corralled the rebound. Not a lot of players make that play.

Deron Williams went seven-for-seven from the line, increasing his total made streak to 47. When asked about it after the game, he cut off the question. “Don’t talk about it!”

Weird fact from NBA.com’s stats tool: the Nets defense was at its worst when Reggie Evans and Brook Lopez, the team’s two best defenders by on-off court numbers, were on the floor. Huh. My guess is anomaly, but still odd.

MarShon Brooks, C.J. Watson, Mirza Teletovic, Kris Humphries combined to shot 0-9 from the field, and the Nets still won. I spoke about this with Chris Shearn and Joe Auriemma on yesterday’s Off The Wall Podcast: The Nets are so deep now that even when two or three of their bench guys are off, the rest of the mob picks up the slack.

Combined numbers from the centers: 31 points on 11-17 shooting and 14 rebounds in 47:48. I’ll take it.